We can now use the blog as both: a company blog and an aggregator at the same time.

Octopress is great for us Ruby devs. We needed partials, sass, themeability, extensibility and a static site.

planet.rb generates markdown files for all the feeds it parses. This keeps it consistent with the rest of the blog, and we love writing markdown.

The tweaks we needed

Planet.rb is still in development, and there were a couple of things that needed to change before we could release. We sent pull requests for these which are now merged in to planet.rb v0.5.0.

A whitelist

One such feature was the ability to filter posts that are not suitable for the company blog. We implemented this as a whitelist of tags. Only posts that have any tags in the whitelist will be imported.

Fault tolerance

Another issue with planet.rb was that it quit abruptly when it failed to parse a blog because the blog was unreacheable. We fixed that and then it was good to go. Here’s how it looks now when we run planet generate: